4 Hire Lawyers In Nun’s Murder

Four employees at Holy Cross Academy – a janitor, a nun, the abbot and the assistant abbot – have hired criminal defense attorneys, along with a criminal attorney hired for the school since a nun was found slain there last weekend.

Joseph Blonsky, Holy Cross board member and attorney, said that putting a team of criminal attorneys in place for school personnel and the school was a reaction to ”an extraordinary situation” that has left ”the Holy Cross family shocked and confused.”

Blonsky said the hiring of criminal defense attorneys was a step taken out of ”an abundance of caution.”

Mykhaylo Kofel, 18, a Holy Cross Academy monk-in-training from Ukraine held in the stabbing death of Sister Michelle Lewis, was assigned an assistant public defender Tuesday, after he turned down school officials’ offer to hire an attorney for him.

It’s unclear why he rejected the school’s offer, but students who knew him said he had complained of verbal abuse, and this could play into the defense.

In another development Thursday, a judge ordered the school’s attorney to store the passports of four other student monks after Kofel’s attorney, Edith Georgi, said she wants to interview them about ”mitigating evidence” in the slaying. She said she feared the abbot could send them back to Ukraine.

James McGuirk will represent the school; Mel Black, Father Abbot Gregory Wendt; Richard Hersh, Father Damian Gibault; Yery Marrero, an unnamed nun; and Terry Lenamon, an unnamed janitor.

Reactions Vary

In the past week, e-mails and phone calls to The Herald from parents of children at the school have varied from outrage over reports that Kofel complained of verbal abuse to expressions of guilt that parents did not do more to look into the well-being of Kofel and other monks in training.

The four remaining student monks are 17, 18, 19 and 20.

At a Thursday arraignment where Kofel entered a plea of not guilty to first-degree murder charges, assistant public defender Georgi described the other student monks as ”witnesses to exculpatory and mitigating evidence.”

She said her efforts to contact them ”have been frustrated by the intervention by Father Damian Gibault . . . Counsel is further concerned that the witnesses may be returned to Ukraine by the school.”

Georgi said afterward: ”It’s a critical factor that the abbot holds their passports. This means he controls them being here or not being here, and we need them here.”

Teens Brought In

Holy Cross Academy, affiliated with the Byzantine Catholic Church, selects teenagers from a monastery school in western Ukraine to come to the Kendall-area private school to train. Kofel had been in training for more than four years and was considered a model trainee.

A spokesperson for Father Judson Procyk at the Byzantine Catholic Church in Pittsburgh, one of the largest dioceses in the country, said that such programs for bringing teenagers over from Eastern Europe to train as monks in the United States are ”unheard of.”

”As far as we know, no one else – not here or in New Jersey or Arizona [where the largest dioceses are] or anywhere – brings children over,” she said.